Below is the youtube video of both the full debate and a recap video by Yaron Brook. An excellent performance by Dr. Brook in this high-profile debate. Communists do seem to be a specialty for objectivists as they, when faced with the inability to answer any practical questions about socialism’s failings try to run away by invoking morality. This is where most libertarians stumble. However, objectivists, being armed with a full philosophical system that includes an ethical base for capitalism, crush and stump any such socialist escape attempts.
The format of the debate is a bit weird, allowing for questions from the audience throughout the entire debate. As a result, the entire thing feels more like a long Q&A rather than a back and forth debate.
Yaron Brook does a great job highlighting what the essential difference is between capitalism and socialism, I recommend you at least watch his closing statement to get a sense of how he was able to frame the debate.
Besides providing the argument of why capitalism is actually still an unknown ideal, Yaron Brook spends the rest of the debate pointing out the extraordinary bizarre claims put forth by Professor Richard Wolff.
Some of these claims are satired in the above meme. At one point Dr. Wolff argues Russian and Chinese revolutions were good. He tries to justify the horror committed by those regimes by saying that revolutions, the French revolution, and the American revolution were all bloody. This is of course completely out of context as the Chinese and Russian regimes murdered 50-100 million people, and sent countless more to concentration camps post-revolution, during what was the implementation of what they considered their ideal system.
At another point, he tries to associate Chinese economic growth with the expansion of socialism. I honestly don’t get what he was trying to pass off here, maybe he was referring to more recent times, clearly, China has liberalized its economy since the 1970s, moving toward a capitalistic market system. With similar moves happening in India as well.
Dr. Wolff also proceeds to blame WW1 and WW2 on capitalism. Yaron Brook provides more detailed refutations of these attempts to re-write history in his recap video below.
